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Paizo's GameMastery Cards provide GMs with tools they need to run more organized and exciting games. Whether the products are GameMastery Item Cards, which feature a beautiful full-color illustration on one side with room for notes on the other, or accessories like our popular Critical Hit Deck, they're designed to make your roleplaying game easier to run and more fun to play.

Paizo’s line of GameMastery accessories dates back to the time before Pathfinder, when we were a magazine publisher just dipping our toes into the RPG game publishing field for the first time. The maps and card products released under the GameMastery line were designed to work with any fantasy RPG, and we wanted a name for the line that suggested the widest appeal to the widest number of customers, regardless of what system they played. Since its launch, we’ve released more than 100 Map Packs and Flip-Mats, and dozens of Item Cards, Face Cards, and other card-based accessories to help you run your campaigns.

Card and map subscriptions are at an all-time high, and the design department keeps finding ways to make each release improve upon those that came before it. We have plenty of terrain types, dungeon maps, and other settings yet to go, and if anything the rate of card sets will increase in the future. We now plan to produce a set of Item Cards and Face Cards for every Adventure Path we publish, with additional rules-oriented releases similar to Chase Cards, Condition Cards, and the Critical Hit deck in development as I write this.

As time has gone on, and as the Pathfinder RPG has become not just a dominant brand here at the Paizo offices but also in the game industry in general, more and more of our GameMastery accessory releases have started to tie into Pathfinder adventures or the Pathfinder rules themselves. As a result, we’ve decided to retire the GameMastery brand, and beginning in February of next year, GameMastery Map Packs, Flip-Mats, and Card releases will come out under the Pathfinder brand.

This change allows us to reexamine how we package our maps, and gives us the chance to improve them to make using the products easier. For Flip-Mats this means packaging the maps with a wrap-around cover similar to the one used for our Pathfinder GM Screen, which gives us more space to preview what the maps look like, highlight key features, and (really importantly) to allow customers (and retailers) to shelve their maps “spine out” for easier sorting. Map Packs will feature a similar packaging metamorphosis, and will now come in a small box for easier storage and display.

Many (even most) of Pathfinder Map Pack, Flip-Mat, and Card releases will still be “rules agnostic” and suitable for use with a variety of systems, but the truth is that the Pathfinder brand has a cachet with buyers, distributors, and customers that GameMastery does not, and this change will allow us to get our products into a wider network of stores. When they make it into those stores, they’ll also be shelved with other Pathfinder products, making it easier than ever for Paizo fans to find what they’re looking for.